In the Clouds

Thank you everyone for supporting me as I got ready for this trip, including silencing me as I pondered aircraft disasters.  I hate goodbyyyyes.  Either way my trip started today flying from the Fort to Philly.  The pope arrives tomorrow and everything is a souvenir for his visit.  And I thought that Mary had lots of statues...  There are several priests walking around in the terminals looking forward to pope Francis visit.  I will say that the Philly airport has some good taste in music none of that dentist office stuff, I was helping older ladies with the hydration stations so they could save a few bucks and walking around trying to keep my legs a' moving.  The Brussels flight was originally scheduled to be nearly an hour early ended up leaving 30mins late because of a poor girl that kept getting sick in the back of the plane, she had to be let off as well as a flight attendant that was caught in the line of fire.  😁   I sat next to a Belgian man who grumbled (somewhat good nature-dly) when the flight attendant would make announcements in English and French but not in Dutch.  He also reminded me that Lille is called Rijsel in Dutch I think he pronounced it something like (r i sel) (rice) 

Basically I'm going to be near the most Flemish (Dutch) town in France.  Brussels airport was easy to figure out, customs was easy peesie and I got this awesome deal by buying my train ticket to Tournai a week ago so it ended up costing only 11.10€, other than the 20-40€ I was expecting to pay, thanks for the good advice Stefano.  One thing I'm careful with right now is that many of these towns near the border use both French and Dutch names for instance the train to 'Tournai' is actually the train to Doornik.  I must look what I'm doing (after checking with a Belgian rail attendant) because I've had some french ask me which train to take, I guess I'm too tired right now to look indecisive.  As soon as the train got going out of the tunnel it started raining, how stereotypical Belgium!  I'm happy though my mommy packed me two sliced up Macintosh apples and I happily munched on the first set on the train, thanks mommy.  I passed through Brussels and Silly (yes Silly) to reach Tournai.  So about a day of travel 11:30 sept 21->1:30 sept 22.  It's a 6 hour time difference.

At Tournai Luciana and Rachel came to pick me up, yeah!  It's funny how you forget that hugs are not acceptable, it was yet again one of those whoa moments.  So it turns out that Rachel has some English calls and bible studies she wants to take me on in a town nearby (yes!) so tomorrow we are going to go in service together and we might even go to an English congregation in Mons, Belgium this Sunday.  Luciana is very much the Italian momma (shes promised to teach me a tiny bit of Italian) she is feeding me a lot of really great food, I literally walked in the door took my bags upstairs and she had spaghetti and probably the best espresso I've ever had waiting on me (gonna have to learn how she does that) she is an effortless great cook and is always calling family and talking in Italian, she doesn't speak English so the only way we can communicate is French.  I did have a moment of homesickness when I was putting my stuff away from my bags but everyone is really nice here plus I listened to some BadBadHats so I'm good; I'm a homesicky kinda person, I'm working on that.  My cell phone is working so stunningly well that I think I will keep my American plan, weird eh?  Why T-mobile do you work better in France than you do in Grabill, Indiana?  I can text for free but calls are 20cents a minute, but amazingly I have unlimited data with pretty good coverage and I think I even have it in other European countries as well.  Tonight was the meeting and I got to meet lots of people, my french is slowly reformulating, everyone is trying to figure out exactly where Indiana is, I didn't fall asleep, and it was really nice.  After the meeting we had dinner (amazing) with Stefano, Luciana's son, who was the one who originally contacted me about the housing arrangement.  I've been in contact with my two contact teachers at each middle school and I'm going to start all my paperwork and administration formalities tomorrow.